Statehood

Bronze monument erected in 1977 to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the state of Oklahoma. It depicts a white cowboy marrying an Indigenous woman. It portrayed the melding of white settlement with the former Indian Territory achieved at statehood.

Heroic-sized bronze sculpture depicting a wedding ceremony between a white cowboy and an Indigenous woman. The local Chamber of Commerce’s dedication plaque describes the statue as “the symbolic wedding uniting Miss Indian Territory and Mr. Cowboy Oklahoma.” This “wedding” between a Native American woman wearing a simple floor-length gown with short sleeves and her hair in two long braids and a young man dressed in a suit and tie, holding his cowboy hat behind his back--“symbolized the twin territories coming into the union as one state.” It depicts the merging of the diverse indigenous and emigrant tribes of Indian Territory and the white settlers who staked claims to their lands to be a happy union.

It was common for postwar pioneer monuments to portray young married couples or nuclear families looking forward to a bright future. A more recent monument in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, portrays a white husband, Native wife, and young son. Both monuments suggest that white settlement on Indigenous homelands--and on lands taken from tribes recently relocated to "Indian Territory" from lands further east--produced a unified multicultural society. Yet the consistent portrayal of Native women entering patriarchal unions with white men also can be interpreted as reflecting white cultural dominance. None of the more than 200 pioneer monuments in the United States depict the marital union of a Native man with a white woman.

Prescott, Cynthia Culver. Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory. Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.